Hero Knob Avalanche

After a great day of skiing in the Hero Knob area, we returned to the Sawmill parking lot at 1:30 pm. From there, we heard and saw a large avalanche release from a couloir on the north side of Mount Smith Dorrien. As you can see from the photo, the powder cloud filled almost the entire valley below the standard descent route from Hero Knob's north bowl (Spray Lakes Road in the foreground). Although no details were available from our vantage point, it seems likely that daytime warming (8 deg) played a role in triggering either a cornice or slab release in the 10 cm of fresh snow from the last two days.